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Apple's Enhanced OpenGL Stack Versus Linux

08-25-2010, 08:40 AM

Phoronix: Apple's Enhanced OpenGL Stack Versus Linux

While our primary focus at Phoronix is on providing Linux benchmarks, we do enjoy trying out and benchmarking other operating systems like FreeBSD, Solaris, and Mac OS X. When Apple originally launched Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard" we were the first to provide detailed Mac OS X 10.6 benchmarks compared to Mac OS X 10.5 and also how Apple's new operating system at the time compared to Linux. We have continued to monitor the performance of Snow Leopard and found that some point releases had introduced some regressions and we have compared the performance of Mac OS X 10.6 to Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. With Apple's release last week of the "Snow Leopard Graphics Update 1.0" that is reported to bring "stability and performance fixes for graphics applications and games in Mac OS X", our interest was piqued and we set out to run a new set of Apple OpenGL benchmarks. In this article we are looking at the OpenGL performance of Mac OS X 10.6, 10.6.2, 10.6.3, 10.6.4, and 10.6.4 with this graphics update installed.

UPDATE: Valve Software has mentioned to us that the NVIDIA MCP79 hasn't received as many optimizations as the newer GeForce 320M/330M and GTX 285 GPUs received, but alas this is all we had available for testing at this time.

All you can pull from that is that one employee from Valve reads Phoronix, which isn't surprising, given the number of employees and people there. A good handful of former classmates work at Valve now, and there are definitely some Linux enthusiasts among them. That means nothing about Valve's corporate policy, though.

I have friends who work at Microsoft who are Linux enthusiasts too, as point of fact, both full-time salaried employees and contractors. I'm pretty freaking sure that doesn't mean that Ballmer has decided to make the next release of IE be GPL'd and the next Windows be a Linux distribution, though.

All any of it means is that the big corporate machines are made up of many free-willed individuals, and not a single one of them boils down to being a purified manifestation of corporate policy and business strategy.

If a growing Linux culture amongst Valve employees has influenced corporate direction towards supporting Linux, we will know only when an official statement is released by Valve. Until then, taking things like an @valve.com email as proof of anything is about as ridiculous as assuming that anything I email from my family's domain represents the shared will and policy of my entire family tree. It always amuses me when people assume that email from [email protected] is an official statement from Example Co in any way. There's a big reason a lot of companies have those annoying disclaimers at the bottom of all mail sent from their servers, even though anybody with common sense doesn't need those disclaimers to spell it out for them.

"A rumor has been going around for about four months that Valve was working on a Linux version of Steam and this had a lot of people in the Linux community very excited. But, Valve has now officially killed the rumor. And it is not what people wants to hear – there is no Linux version of Steam in development. Doug Lombardi, the Marketing VP of Valve Corporation, in an interview, has put an end to all the rumors by saying that they are not working on Steam for Linux right now."

Comment

These results tell me that OpenGL on Mac is implemented with a nonlinear workload whereas Linux's is. There could be some constant time scaling on some resolutions or perhaps some geometries. It would be nice to see these along side with CPU utilization.

Comment

There are enough coverage sites for Windows and Mac, but really not that many sites covering Linux. I think benchmarks around that topic are far more important than promoting such a harmful company as Apple. Do anything but Apple, even Windows if you have to. But don't promote this trash.